I: Allegro | Searchlight Song: "Reason to Begin"
Today I sat at the piano and played Chopin and felt vaguely as if I were about to cry. No great occurrence, surely—I spend a lot of time nowadays on the brink of tears—but this was the first time in a long while that I felt perfectly and unforgivably certain that I had to write it down, the first time that I imagined the words desperately enough to force them out. I hovered in that space I think all of us know, just before the knot starts forming in your throat, between the surface and the sting. When, for once, the world is quicker inside you than it is around you. I had to walk it off. The melody stretching over a polonaise’s one-two-three, those lines in that poem you can’t stop trying to set to music—none of them are about you, really, until the instant that they are, catastrophic and newly alive. Today was the first day in weeks that I walked outside to catch the bus in the half-dark of the morning and something in me stopped when I looked at the road, awash in rain. I knew that nothing had actually stopped, not really, that the cars were still moving fast enough to kill, that the sun was still climbing up to a sky that still shifted for it. I knew that my mind was still as off-tempo as it’s always been, never quite able to keep time, forever confused by whatever metronome is leading this dance, convinced it must be just out of earshot. And yet: there is a very particular way the streetlamps held everything in the blue-tinted damp that my whole body remembers. You would see it in my eyes, my hands, all shaky but sure of themselves at last. I would tell you about it if you asked, but I won’t, because you won’t.
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This year, somewhere in between the schoolwork and the late nights and the fifteen years still crashing inside me as if they’d learn how to fit eventually, I lost my grasp of language and my touch at the piano. Speed: distance over time. Survival: mind over matter. Over masterpiece. Here was the breath still rattling in the back of my throat, the frenzied pulse still tap-tap-tapping the length of my limbs, and me with no good way of telling anyone why.
I’d spent so much time creating around myself rather than about myself that any true thing I tried to say would no longer be true the moment I’d said it. I wanted to write something about music that didn’t feel like decoration. I wanted to play a few notes I could relate to. I wanted to make something that felt no need to be beautiful. Something that was beautiful anyway. I’ll be ready someday, I insisted to no one, but the thing about someday is that it runs away from you if you don’t want it loudly enough.
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The opening chords of Chopin’s Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat major, opus 61, still terrify me after two months of practice. It isn’t that they’re especially difficult to lay my fingers on or somehow beyond my technical abilities. No, what I’m afraid of is how they could grow inside the pit of my stomach, claw up and out for something bigger to hold on to. You can only trap such things for so long. Already they skid over my spine as if trying to reach a little deeper. Second heartbeat stirring in the wrong place, surging ahead, built to die. (You’ve always had a knack for Chopin, my teacher says. You know how to do freedom right.) They yearn like I do: fierce, hollow dreams on the seven-am roads. Dim yellow light falling over the memory of rain. Yearning and yearning with the heavy, heavy knowledge that it may never amount to anything more than that.
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And so for me, creating has begun to feel like catch-up. There are never enough hours in the day when you are constantly on the cusp of something grand, something absolutely devastating—I can feel it, you say to anyone who’ll listen. I can feel it right here, and you point somewhere different every time.
I’ll look back on this in ten years, I know, and part of me has to believe that this will be an Era, neatly defined, hammered into the shape of a story. Starting somewhere in the smoke that was age fourteen, tapering off after two years or so, something I can point at and open back up again on command. Part of me has to believe that this gnawing need for greater things isn’t where I’ll settle. Settling might not be the right word. I’ll turn this page, pick up where I left off, use my hands as well as I used to, do it all without looking back.
I’m waiting for the day I can outrun the work and my own freewheeling wishes. How strange that waiting has become nothing but moving, moving, moving. Forward only if I can find it.
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Opus 61 still eludes me. I still don’t know if anything I ever write for myself will really be enough. If memory is something I can ever bring back without making it feel like performance. I’m learning to be okay with that, at least for now.
I suppose what I’m trying to say—even now there is only try—is that things will only get faster from here, and that is all the more reason to take every breath and every step and every word completely and recklessly for your own. That’s all the reason we need to begin: in love, in stuttering apology, in hopeless defiance of the ever-spinning earth. Lift your eyes. This is our endless. Our ending even as it begins. Our crescendo spilling into the drenched streets. The light of the morning trembling in its newness at the edges of our sight. We the outpaced; we the stumbling and the inadvertently brave. This world will have to give us at least that much.
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(Searchlight Song is a column by Christina Im about the music behind identity: how it shapes us, explains us, and finds us when we are stumbling in the dark. This column, along with another by Half Mystic's editor-in-chief Topaz Winters and many more pieces by contributors, is published in Half Mystic's Issue I: ALLEGRO. It is available in our shop now.)